I never met Leo Finn in person but I’ve been connected to him since last October via Facebook.

We were introduced by a mutual friend who knew I covered biotech and also lives on Cape Cod, where Finn lived. It was in the first few days of the government shutdown, when a lot of people in the media were looking for ways to put a human face on the event.

Finn provided one. He had been recently diagnosed with a late-stage liver cancer and was signed up to take part in an experimental drug trial at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but learned a day before that the trial was to be indefinitely delayed due to the shutdown. Starting with an angry post of Facebook, the story quickly went viral and spread to U.S. Rep. William Keating and the director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA ended up reopening a unit of the agency to allow drug trials to go on despite the shutdown. It was an amazing thing to watch for the sheer power of a single voice to help others.

Since the hype died down, I’ve watched the hundreds of friends and relatives Finn had post on his Facebook page about his life and how much they loved him. I’ve quietly seen Finn himself post pictures of himself with his family in Disneyland, at bars watching the Bruins, and helping organize a Relay for Life team down on the Cape.

On Monday morning, I woke up to see his friends posting condolences for his passing. His wife, Kimberly Finn, confirmed that Finn had in fact died of cancer on Sunday evening, March 23, one which she described as the “hardest, worst day of (her) life.”

“He always did anything he could to help others,” she said. “And knowing that he was helping other people get their trials too just gave him so much joy. He never did anything that was self-serving, he always took care of others.”

Finn’s life meant infinitely more to his family and friends than the person who reopened the FDA’s drug trials last October, and I apologized about a dozen times in writing to Kimberly Finn in the course of contacting her for this story. But from the point of view of patients everywhere suffering from diseases for which there are no cures, or the existing treatments are inadequate, Finn played an important role.

His efforts to bring attention to the life-or-death importance of drug trials is a reminder that the business of drug development is not just about getting new drugs approved. The very act of running a trial gives patients hope that someone is making the effort to do something, and that the disease from which he or she is suffering hasn’t been forgotten.

His death, however, underscores the risk inherent in the process of finding new drugs. While the industry tends to focus on the millions of dollars lost on drugs that don’t work out, the far greater risk is borne by the thousands of patients who volunteer to be in drug trials every year, many of whom never know whether or not they will get the drug or a placebo. Finn, in the end, was the human face not of outrage over the federal government shutdown, but of the patients who give their lives so that others in the future can benefit from life-saving treatments.